Alright, so it’s understandable that homemade plate armor, etc take weeks to create. But stuff like simple knife spears just seem to take way more time than they really should, I don’t think it should take 3 hours for someone to tape a knife to the end of a stick…
(On second inspection it should appear the crafting times for the /makeshift/ knife spear and /simple/ knife spear were accidentally set to be the same, unless it was intentional which is kind of silly.)
Oh and for the record Im playing on the latest stable version
It uses the proficiency Carving, which means that it probably involves cutting out a place at the end of the long stick to hold a knife. I have no rl experience of crafting a knifespear though.
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Back ages ago when I first nerfed a lot of ridiculously fast crafting times and added proficiency effects I did it in a giant batch. None of them are set in stone because it was utterly impossible to check each and every one, there were thousands. However, I think some of them have been kinda treated as if they’re what I thought was appropriate, and not just what I put on there as part of trying to adjust 8000 recipes. if you see a crafting time you think is out of line, feel free to suggest a change to it on github either as an issue or as pull request. as long as you can back up your reasoning with a bit of logic, the bar to entry for something like a knife spear isn’t high.
What I’d personally say is that lacking carving should only make it a tiny bit slower, but should have a bit of an impact on your failure chance. Probably, it’s using the default time and failure rates from carving proficiency rather than a custom one to represent how relatively unimportant carving is to the project overall.
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In fact, I appreciate this matter.
Let me provide a feasible explanation:
When I engage in actual hands-on tasks in real life, like trying to make an alcohol stove out of a soda can, I often spend an entire afternoon repeatedly pondering and figuring out how to do it. It’s only on my second attempt that I truly understand where to make the holes and where to cut.
I want to suggest that in the game, a character with a skill level of 0 can be understood as completely unfamiliar with the task, lacking even basic knowledge. As players, we are not entirely ignorant, which is why there’s a discrepancy in our judgment of the crafting time.
Perhaps the crafting time we consider appropriate is actually the time it would take for a character with some level of common sense, or an upgraded skill level, to complete the task.
So maybe adding 1 point to each skill to give characters basic common sense would make sense?
Maybe 0 skill should mean that people have absolutely no clue about it and it will never increase no matter how much they fumble about. You have some clue about alcohol stoves but no proficiency. You fumble about spending a day making a stove until your proficiency increased and you can make a better stove in a quarter of the time.
For example my grandma has 0 computer skills. If she types something in browser search bar and doesn’t receive the results she wanted, she types it out again but presses keyboards buttons harder. She thinks printing out a document is a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right order and moving mouse a precise amount of millimeters in between clicking. She refuses to learn the underlying abstractions for anything and thinks its easier to write out which buttons to press on paper and chart the course of the mouse for every activity she wants.
I think what’s currently called “skills” should signify theoretical knowledge (or maybe something new should be added). For practical knowledge we have proficiencies already, but some things are simply too slow to develop by a single person in a lifetime, like chemistry or computer science, and require studying from books to know the underlying mechanisms for. Some things like knife spears are probably indeed too obvious to need theory, but others you shouldn’t be able to figure out no matter how much fumbling you engage in. How many people could figure out that you need to leach fat with lye to make soap without reading about it?
Part of the answer here is don’t give yourself 0 in skills unless you’re looking for a challenge to overcome.
Part of it is proficiencies are specifically intended to represent the kind of fiddling around and prototype making outlined above. You’re not spending three hours attaching a knife to a stick, you’re spending that long figuring out how to attach a knife to a stick through trial and error. If anything I’d call 3h at no skills or proficiencies generous.
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